Real and immanence in cinema

Daniela Angelucci

Università di Roma Tre
dangelucci@uniroma3.it

Abstract: The pair Real and Immanence makes reference to two concepts employed respectively by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. My proposal is that there is a strong affinity between these two concepts, and that they can contribute to clarifying a specific capacity of art, in particular that of cinema. According to scholars who criticize the application of psychoanalysis to the arts, psychoanalysis always misses what should be its object – the work of art – studying the artist’s unconscious (or characters’ unconscious) or the unconscious of the viewers. I think, rather, that it is possible to study the phenomenon of art using some psychoanalytical concepts, at the same time considering art in its formal procedures and not only in its narrative or figurative contents. I believe that considering artistic content as if it was a shell containing the unconscious of the author that leads fatally to a failure of interpretation. Instead, observing and pointing out the similarities between ordinary psychic processes and the experiences that we all have of art, cinema, in this case, is a decisive step towards clarifying some aspects of its nature and its features. In such a perspective, aesthetic experience is an experience that cannot be dissolved in ordinary life, because it maintains its own specificity, but it is not totally separate (something considered as a luxury, something that you can consider at the end, when the needs of other more “serious” dimensions of our existence have been satisfied). During the aesthetic experience of a work of art, or that of a film rich with aesthetic qualities, the constituent aspects of nature and human life appear visible, enhanced, intensified, and reconfigured. I therefore propose to think in this way the interplay between aesthetics and psychoanalysis, on the questions of the Real and Immanence: aesthetic experience is a space where some psychic processes of ordinary experience appear in a more intense way.
 
Keywords: Real; Immanence; Lacan; Deleuze; Aesthetic; Psychoanalysis.